TNT: Evilution was completed in November 1995, and was going to be released for free. However, a publishing deal was brokered by John Romero, resulting in the commercial release of Final Doom by id Software.

The commercialization of TNT: Evilution caused a certain amount of controversy amongst the Doom community, and TNT: Evilution is consequently one of Doomworld's "Top 10 Infamous WADs", albeit not for reasons of gameplay or level design. TNT: Evilution has a much more technical feel with levels that are akin to real buildings, versus The Plutonia Experiment, whose floor design tends more toward a natural landscape feel.

Contents

Story

In TNT: Evilution the UAC once again are intent on developing and experimenting with dimensional gateway technology. They set up a base on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, with a solid detachment of space marines for protection. The marines do their job well: when the first experimental gateway is opened they annihilate the forces of Hell. Anything that came through the gateway was immediately destroyed by the marines, and so research on the gateways continued.

Later, the yearly supply ship came earlier than expected, and looks strange and unusually large on the radar. The personnel of the base go out to behold the terrible truth: it is a spaceship from Hell, built of steel, stone, flesh, bone and corruption. The ship's enormous gates open to unleash a rain of demons on the base. Quickly, the whole base is overrun, and everyone is slain or zombified.

The Doomguy, now in command of the marine deployment, has been away on a walk, and has thus escaped death or zombification. After being attacked by an imp he rushes back to the base, where he sees the demonic spaceship still hovering above it and realizes what has happened. Then he swears that he will seek vengeance for his slain troops, and sets out to kill as many evil creatures as possible.

In the end, the marine defeats the Demon-Spitter, and the game describes Something rumbles in the distance. A blue light begins to glow inside the ruined skull of the Demon-Spitter.

Levels

As in Doom II, the levels can be divided up into three sets, defined by the skies and separated by a textual intermission in addition to the standard intermission screen; as well as two secret levels. Additional textual interludes appear before MAP07, before each secret level, and at the conclusion of the game. The designers of each map were unveiled by Ty Halderman in a post at the Doomworld forums in 2004, showing that several level designs were shared between multiple authors. [1]

The Steam version of Final Doom does not play several demos of TNT: Evilution which were earlier recorded. The reason is that the DOOM2.EXE of Final Doom was updated. If you get a synchronization lost, you can try to play it using Doom II instead of Final Doom. You will need to copy the TNT.WAD into the DOOM II folder, and add the "-file TNT.WAD" command line parameter (without quotes). It was checked on all desynced UV max and several UV speed demos from Compet-n.

TNT: Evilution has a mostly techbase ambience, similar to the first episode of the original Doom, with sporadic hellish features, transitioning to a fully hellish ambience in MAP25. Consequently, it's arguable that the narration screen which runs after the player beats MAP20 (describing the Doomguy reentering Hell) should appear after MAP24 instead, but it is prevented from doing so by the limitations of its Doom II-based WAD file. Even the names of the levels, which likewise transition from techbase to hellish between MAP24 and MAP25, appear to support this idea.